On Mon, 2006-11-27 at 14:20 +0000, Bijan Parsia wrote:
[...]
> what you describe is also one of our goals in the Attempto project
> (see: http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/attempto/). We have recently implemented
> a program
> that converts OWL ontologies into Attempto Controlled English (ACE),
> see:
>
> http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/attempto/documentation/OWL_to_ACE/
I tried that on an ontology that is in development these days:
An Ontology for vCards
http://www.w3.org/2006/vcard/ns
Date:
14 November 2006
Authors:
Harry Halpin
Brian Suda
Norman Walsh
The results are sorta reasonable...
Every VCard revs at most 1 things .
Every Name family-names at most 1 things .
Every Name given-names at most 1 things .
Every Name additional-names at most 1 things .
Every Name honorific-prefixs at most 1 things .
Every Name honorific-suffixs at most 1 things .
...
though they show that the OWL_to_ACE tool doesn't expect
use of the http://esw.w3.org/topic/RoleNoun pattern.
I'd suggest supporting a special kind of label for the purpose of
controlled english generation; i.e. a subproperty of rdfs:label.
maybe ace:englishVerb.
I know the tabulator supports rdfs:label; I think it expects
them to be role nouns. Maybe it should coin a purpose-specific
tab:roleNoun property in case somebody wants to use rdfs:label
for something else. Hm... it seems to grab all subproperties
of rdfs:label
http://dig.csail.mit.edu/2006/Papers/SWUI06/tab
I wonder if the folks in the semweb-ui list discuss this stuff.
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-semweb-ui/2006Sep/
> This should give an overview of what we think the controlled natural
> language for
> expressing OWL should be like. Our claim is that an average user can
> grasp
> the contents of an ontology better if it was presented in ACE rather
> than
> visualized by Protege or similar editors. (We haven't done any
> experiments
> yet to back this up.)
I have heard this claim from other places, though.
I agree that rendering to a constrained dialect of English is an
interesting user-interface technique; I made a note about that
during the OWL-ED workshop
http://swig.xmlhack.com/2006/11/10/2006-11-10.html#1163171978.746560
"(Tom? stanford guy) says the English format spit out by SWOOP is very
valuable"
> There is also a description of how to convert ACE texts into OWL:
>
> http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/attempto/documentation/writing_owl_in_ace.html
>
> Comments welcome.
>
--
Dan Connolly, W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Connolly/
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